Zombie Jon Snow said:
Their aversion to singles wasn't particularly about it breaking up bands and I don't even really remember that mentioned in the movie but I've only watched it once and it was months ago.
While there certainly could be friction over singles. Consider like the Beatles where it was very much a competition between Lennon and McCartney at times and they were trying to balance it on albums and make both artists happy. Also they sometimes played different instruments and re-recorded songs without one of the members present. LZ would not have had much of that contention anyway as they had one lead singer and they all contributed on their respective instrument.
Mostly LZ just wanted to focus on making albums and the focus was the entire thing as a piece of art to them. They also did not want to be constrained by the typical time limitations of most singles that studios and producers and radio stations wanted artists to conform to. Queen and Rush were later bands that also refused to conform. They also considered doing singles as kind of selling out commercially and considered themselves serious artists.
They also just basically opted to build their brand and following through Live shows primarily instead of top 40 airplay which allowed them even longer form versions of their songs in jams. And it worked as they were renowned for their live shows whereas the Beatles by comparison stopped performing live and hated it.
Just an artistic choice and their music lent itself to Live format and long form.
Although it ws not just because of LZ in a lot of ways the growth of what was AOR or Album Orient Rock radio stations was because of bands like LZ and later Rush, Queen, etc. The album oriented format and playing any/all of a record became very popular on those rock stations throughout the 70s. When I first got into music in the late 70s that was huge. I remember a station in KC that played entire new albums on Saturday nights and you could sit and record the entire thing on cassette tape and have a nearly free album. I did that a lot.
I think there was a station in Houston a decade or two ago that still played whole albums. I was visiting and I just happened across it when they were playing a song from the 60s that was just some dude playing a guitar, and it sounded good. And It just went on to the next song and the next song, and I never found out who it actually was. I had to get out of the car, without finding out.
Personally, I think LZ is better than the Beatles. The first time I remember hearing of the Beatles, was on a road trip with boy scouts, and the dad driving had an 8-track with a crap ton of Beatles songs. Usually the drivers let us pick a station, but he kept playing Beatles songs, and I remember me and the other scouts in the car thought it sounded like total crap (this was early 80s). When we complained, he said, "this is the Beatles! The greatest rock band of all time!" Only occasionally would he play a song that I recognize and didn't hate. To me, their music sounded so dated and old. Like we were listening to music from 1950, not the 60s.
However, I also remember where I was when I first heard a LZ song. It was on a commercial about some greatest hits album or something. I remember hearing Kashmir, Levee, and several others. And I thought, "damn that sounds good". Obviously, their music was a decade later later, but I think they could have been transported into the 90's and they would have fit right in. Maybe they were way ahead of their time. To me, the quality of their music is simply better.
My opinion on both were completely untainted by hype. I was going just off the music alone.
